Officials said random wandings of students have increased at East Aurora High School, not because of any specific incident but just as a measure to increase security and make students feel safer.

Officials said random wandings of students have increased at East Aurora High School, not because of any specific incident but just as a measure to increase security and make students feel safer. (Steve Lord / The Beacon-News)

In the nearly two months since a fatal shooting at a Florida high school, some Fox Valley districts are experiencing heightened focus on security at their own schools.

In St. Charles, where discussions about large-scale security upgrades were already underway before the shooting, a district administrator said attention on security has increased since the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Florida, and likely caused some of the work to be accelerated.

On Aurora’s East Side, a school spokesman said there have been more “intentional” conversations surrounding school security with officials in other districts and the Aurora Police Department since the shooting.

He also said random security-wanding of students has increased, which is not necessarily a direct response to Parkland but might help put at ease any students and staff feeling unsettled about security since the shooting.

“We will always be having discussions about safety and security, and certainly Parkland has put that more to the forefront for us,” East Aurora School District 131 spokesman Tom Jackson said.

East Aurora has had a safety and security committee, but Jackson said the recent shooting opened the door to more collaboration among districts. East Aurora officials are meeting with those in neighboring West Aurora School District 129, and the East Aurora High School principal has met to discuss security with other high school principals in the Upstate Eight conference, he said.

District officials look at school security every day, and there are always more measures the district can take, Jackson said.

Roughly one year ago work began to add more security cameras and upgrade existing ones at East Aurora district schools.

More recently, in the past several months, random wanding of students has increased, Jackson said. The district has searched students with security wands previously, but increased the searches in an effort to ensure safety in buildings and to help students and staff, who might see the wanding taking place, feel more comfortable with their security, he said.

One of the challenges of school security is balancing the need to keep a school safe with the desire to make it welcoming, Jackson said. Efforts to achieve that balance are always continuing, he said.

“I think that we live in a different world,” Jackson said. “So what was welcoming in the ‘50s and ‘60s, or what was welcoming five or 10 years ago, might need to look a little different because of the world we live in.”

As St. Charles School District 303 works on a planned $1 million in security upgrades, spokeswoman Carol Smith said the district does not think the changes will affect student learning.

“We feel that it’s just an improvement to securing our learning environment,” she said. “But we’re still committed to maintaining a welcoming environment in our schools.”

Among the planned upgrades are bullet-resistant glass or coating. The coating is designed to prevent glass from shattering, which would keep an intruder from shooting it out and crawling through the space, Smith said.

The district is also looking to change building entrances to add what Smith described as a second layer of security. Now, in some buildings, visitors are required to sign in but if they chose to could likely run quickly past the sign-in and into the building, she said.

The planned upgrades were not in relation to the Parkland shooting, officials said. They are among a series of security upgrades in St. Charles that began to be put in place roughly three years ago. They are funded by a pot of money intended for only certain uses, and this year the district received more money into that pot than it had planned so is able to proceed with the upgrades quicker, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Seth Chapman said.

But the shooting did draw attention to security in the district, and St. Charles officials have since invited parents to be part of an already-standing safety task force, Smith said.

“It certainly has heightened the awareness of not only our staff members, but also our community,” Smith said. “So we’ve had several parents that have reached out to us to ask us about our safety protocols and procedures.”

The shooting also might have caused the security upgrades to progress quicker, Chapman said.

“I think it would be fair to say that while we were planning on doing this work anyway now that we have the funds available, certainly the attention to this issue is certainly making it a lot more accelerated,” he said. “We would be doing more buildings this year regardless, but would we be doing all of those? I can’t say for sure.”

Batavia School District 101, too, is increasing some security measures, but a spokeswoman said they were not related to the Parkland shooting or any other threat or perceived threat.

In a statement dated April 4 that the district said was from the Batavia Police Department, officers said they had “dedicated more time and resources” to monitor and protect schools in the previous month. They would continue to have an increased presence during student drop-off and pick-up, and uniformed officers would continue random outside perimeter checks. They planned to have a presence inside schools, walking through the halls, stopping in classrooms and joining in student lunch hours.

“We, as a police department, are striving to ensure an environment where children and staff feel safe and secure,” they said in the statement.